An effective way to use Heuristic Evaluation
The application of heuristics in design starts with building on a good user experience. Keep the heuristic evaluation on top of a good user experience, then only the results would be expected. You’ll be able to analyze what is good and what can be eventually improved after the heuristic evaluation is carried out. As said, now let’s look into “Effective way of how to conduct heuristic evaluations”:
- Be clear with “What do you want to test”? – Which means which feature or functionality do you want to check? Collate all wireframes, prototypes, and designs which you want to test before proceeding with the heuristic evaluation.
- Set test priority – Draw out what you want to test and what is the severity or priority of that feature to be evaluated. Consider the following while setting up your priority:
- Frequency – How commonly does this occurs, required or needed for the product to meet basic goals
- Persistence – Is this feature/action etc required once or repeatedly for a product to sustain?
- Retention/Impact – How would users respond to this? Would it be easy or difficult to sustain under this change or addition?
- The Process – How you want to carry out the heuristic evaluation because it can be done through the design team as well as with the help of specialized agencies or evaluators. It would be purely the org-level decision that is important to be analyzed based on budget, time, and effort.
- Heuristic Evaluation Phase – Here you check designs based on the above-mentioned pointers then collect and collate data into sheets which would be evaluated further.
- Analysis – Whatever data has been collected through the actual evaluation process, now it is the time to sit and analyze that data. Discuss with the agency/team or evaluator and have a healthy conversation about why, what, and how to improve the designs. Not just discussion, but plan out how to iterate over the feedback and when to roll out V2 for the respective feature.
- Iteration – It is the last step in the cycle, which would be to incorporate all the feedback you received. Then again carry out 1 or 2 rounds of feedback (depending on how many rounds are required).
Top Heuristic Principles with Examples For Interactive Designs
Only designing interfaces is not the end, as a designer, you must have a solid understanding of how to measure it for your own designs. How do you determine whether your goods are genuinely usable? Once the designs are ready, to run a usability test heuristics principles come into the picture, using which we carry out the heuristic evaluation. Though usability is a vast field and includes a lot more than just heuristic evaluation, it is an essential practice.
In this article, we would be looking into some very important heuristics to evaluate whether the design you have created is usable or not.